Nobody seems to be interested in providing Tools anymore; they want you to use their Product instead.
Reality is that tools don't make money when given away for free.
Why should tools 'make money' in the first place? Seriously.
A huge part of the internet infrastructure and high-performance computing world is built with tools given away for free: Linux kernel and Linux distributions like Debian and old RHEL; GNU development tools like GCC, GNU C library, Make, Autotools, etc.; server software projects like Apache and Nginx; programming language projects like Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby; and so on. Even Wikipedia, if you consider it a tool.
If those tools weren't free, the world today would look very, very different.
As time progresses, an increasing number of these want to convert their popularity into profits, turning themselves from tools into profit-making Products.
This is a problem.
RHEL used to be
the choice on the server side, but was turned into a product, making it (and its derivatives like CentOS and ScientificLinux) much less useful. Indeed, both ScientificLinux and CentOS have been discontinued. Things like appliances are not built on top of the existing Linux distributions and knowledge; their firmware is shoddily cobbled together by commercial teams that produce a productized fork they maintain for a year or two if at all, then abandon, leaving the users of the appliances at risk of exploitation, forcing them to 'upgrade' to newer hardware. Which of course acts as planned obsolescence, and is a desirable feature in a product for the vendors.
Just because the tools are free, do not mean they do not need
support.
I have always supported the tools I use by contributing development and bugfixing time. It would be even better for organizations to examine their free tool use, and occasionally provide grants to projects that maintain the most useful tools. This has nothing to do with ethics, and everything to do with pure self-interest: if the continued existence of a tool is in your own interest, ensuring its maintenance and further development via grants, bugfix bounties, or hardware donations is in your own interest.
Those without significant financial means, can instead contribute time, for example in translations, documentation, or development. Those with financial means, should put their money where they get the most out of it
in the long term.
The underlying problem is that many humans really cannot understand
the economics of common goods; they only understand products and market economy. We can see this well in e.g. air quality: since everybody needs to breathe air, and nobody has to pay for breathing air, people are demanding
others fix the air quality issues (pollution and whatnot), instead of doing something themselves first. Yet, air is a common good, and pure self-interest should dictate that every single self-aware individual maintains the common goods they rely on.
Key point is that although
TANSTAAFL is absolutely true, it does not mean that paying up front for things and making everything a Product is the way to go. It only means everything has a cost, even if it is voluntary (as in the case of common goods and free/open software). As your reliance on a specific free good grows, its importance to you grows, so it makes a lot of sense to use some resources to bolster that free good you rely on.
It really is very simple. It is just that most humans have been successfully programmed to think solely in terms of Products, because that way Marketing is an effective tool to part a fool from his money and resources. Pooling resources to bolster a shared (free) common good is not communism/socialism –– no matter how badly Marketing wants to label it as such ––, and is just a rational, efficient way to maintain common goods.
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